BrowserUk,
I fail to see the ambiguity? ... So explicitly naming @_ on every use of shift just seems like cargo cult to me.

The point I was trying to make "I think perl's shortcuts can get in the way of writing maintainable code sometimes", wasn't based on personal experience as I caveated. When I explain a piece of code to someone who doesn't know perl that well, regardless of how well they program in other languages, I find myself constantly having to explain what is implied but not said. When I explain my own code to someone who does understand perl, they still often complain that my terseness is too much (diotalevi for instance).

I find the bar() sub faster to update with less mistakes. I know the mistake is easily found and corrected with warnings and strictures but it helps me to avoid them in the first place.

I guess working around a bunch of Java programmers who can't understand my code has tainted me. Update: I don't know if I defended my position that well. As I said, I don't have any real world experience with production code. My limited non-professional experience tells me terse implicit code requires another person more time to understand than it would take me to write it explicitly the first time.